Compatible with Raspberry Pi 4?

Has anyone looked at whether the ThunderBorg can work with a Raspberry Pi 4? Connecting with cables would be fine for my project, but I'm unsure about the 3 amps minimum requirement through the 5V DC GPIO header.

Thanks in advance for any feedback! :-)

piborg's picture

The short answer is that it will depend on what you are doing with the Pi 4.

The ThunderBorg DC/DC only produces 1.5 A, which is below the 3 / 2.5 A minimums listed on the Pi 4 technical specifications: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/specifications/
As such we cannot promise that it will work under all circumstances.

Having said that I did some testing this morning with a Pi 4 and ThunderBorg with the following setup:

  • Raspberry Pi 4 - 1GB
  • ThunderBorg attached on top
  • 9.6 V power supply
  • Only keyboard and mouse connected to the USB
  • CPU loaded to ~80%

This ran fine without showing the "low power" thunderbolt symbol. It was running under constant heavy load for long enough (~20 minutes) that it reached thermal throttling :)

My guess is that if the Raspberry Pi is under light to moderate load with no power hungry peripherals attached it will work fine, but given it does not meet the foundation's minimum specifications I cannot make any promises.

Great, thank you for the fast response! I'll give it a go. Initially we will not have a lot of peripherals and then build from there.

Would it be conceivable to wire two Thunderborg 5V outputs in parallel, if it becomes necessary?

piborg's picture

We have tried connecting the 5V outputs in parallel before, unfortunately it does not work as hoped. It will not cause any problems, but it does not create a 3A output either :(

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